Somewhere between funny-ha-ha and funny-strange.

The clever poems in this collection are based on jokes, but move far beyond them. That is, Hecht begins with a joke we’re all in on (in many, a character or animal walks into a bar) and lets her imagination work its highbrow/lowbrow magic as she riffs and rolls along, sometimes viewing the joke from many angles, sometimes letting it lead her where it will. One theme of this collection seems to be the play of limitless possibilities versus the closing off of options as choices are made — each decision a closed door. Another theme is that of life’s dualities and the ways in which they overlap. Interleaved between the main sections are three sonnets, each of which considers a duality: mirth vs. grief, comedy vs. tragedy, hope vs. sorrow.

Hecht uses jokes as a way of exploring and understanding facets of experience that are nearly impossible to put into words. And this has something very much in common with jokes. “Jokes work,” says Hecht (in the Afterword), “when shared knowledge, upon which the joke hinges, goes unspoken.” There’s a lot more here, including the Afterword — well worth pondering — in which the author seeks to explain why she believes that jokes are the most important thing in the universe.

“The best
you can do is reopen the field
of possibilities and resist
rushing them closed. Bear
the anxiety of not knowing.
Resist summing up.”

from “Gorilla in a Darkening Room”

“Is this blind
groping choosing?”

— from “Horse Makes a Decision”

“Dangerous you, dangerous me. Surprises behind
every door, and all of them the same.”

— from “Are You Not Glad?”


From the Afterword, “An Essay on the Philosophy of Funny”

“More than poetry is based on rhyming; laughter, of all human responses, is based on . . . timing.”

“That comedy comes from people not knowing themselves seems evident once you think about it.” I suppose that’s true. ;)

“Jokes have the potential to tell us about how the world is unified, by grabbing opposing ends of something with one name; bringing the ends together so that what they have in common and what they have as difference becomes visible.”

“The real world fails our expectations but frequently has pleasures greater than those we expected. Thus, the joke is the primary fractal of life; it is the emblem of the disappointment and I mean this in a grand sense: not only in the relationship of a concept to its thing, but in how things were supposed to be but never became, and then the surprising recovery into something new. We notice that this something now was there to be known all along.”

( )

Great collection of joke-based poems. Each poem tells a joke shortly and then dives into an examination of both its humorous and philosophic core. For example, one poem is about the horse who walks into a bar and faces the bar tender's question, why the long face? The poem then tries to answer from the horse's point of view. The jokes are diverse and the poems are simultaneously funny, serious, and enigmatic. The language is witty and full of pyrotechnics. The book ends with an inspiring essay (I think it's almost a prose-poem) about jokes and poetry. ( )